Moving away from github

Bye, bye github...!

Posted on Oct. 18, 2018

Dear FOSS diary,

it is over. Our time that we we were happy to use github. Don't misunderstand us, we are not angry at github, but some things don't work out.

One of the most annoying issues with github is that even after asking many times over many years, there is still no IPv6 support. This might not bother you, but in our IPv6 only networks, this is really annoying. It basically means that the code we create and upload to github, becomes inaccessible to our servers.

When Microsoft bought github, we were shocked. Not surprised, but shocked. Microsoft has bought dozens, if not hundreds companies over the years. Many of their services degraded in quality (recall hotmail), some of them just disapperead after some time (many competitors).

While some people believe this is due to Microsoft opening up, we don't believe this story. And we have good reasons not to. When Microsoft started their Open Source engagement some years ago, we were invited to meet them here in Switzerland, to discuss business opportunities. While there is indeed a minority of people at Microsoft who do live the open source spirit, we also learned that the majority of Microsoft is about sales and market domination. And we all know what pain this monopoly has been causing over years.

So that's why we move on, forward to more decentralisation. We are grateful for the good experience and inspirations from github and want to say "Thanks for the fish" at this point.

We are migrating all our repositories* to https://code.ungleich.ch/ungleich-public and will leave a README on github referencing the new location. And we urge other open source projects to follow, to decentralise.

In case you want to move, but don't want to run your own gitlab instance, team ungleich provides private gitlab instances including migration from github. Just drop us a line to info at ungleich.ch.